What does it mean to love somebody?
According to Michael Kramp, a better
question to pose when reading Jane
Austen’s novels is: what does it mean to
not love another? In Disciplining Love:
Austen and the Modern Man, Kramp
argues that most of Austen’s male protagonists
regulate their desires to help
“justify and maintain hegemonic structures
that support modern patriarchy.”
Kramp’s thesis probably will annoy
those who appreciate the novels as tales
of romance. It will, however, reassure
those who have always felt slightly
uneasy about the whiff of incest that
hangs over the union of Fanny and
Edmund or the specter of pedophilia that
accompanies Knightley’s joking confession
that he fell in love with Emma
when she was thirteen years old.

Kramp draws on the work of several theorists,
including Gilles Deleuz and Félix
Guattari, who provide him with a definition
of love. According to Kramp, “love
destroys the singularity and security of
the individual and compels each lover
to embrace the diversity and complexity
in both the self and the other.” Such
love, however, undermines man’s ability
to “maintain authority in the domestic
realm” and thus to “act politically, as he
could not be a social man without the
sexual subjectivity generated by his
hegemonic maintenance of the home.” To be an effective member of his civic
community, and of his nation, the modern
man thus had to regulate his desires.
Enter The History of Sexuality by Michel
Foucault, to which Kramp’s thesis is profoundly
indebted. Quoting Foucault,
Kramp asserts that, “at the close of the
eighteenth century, sex and its regulation
became ‘a concern of the state ... sex
became a matter that required the social
body as a whole, and virtually all of its
individuals to place themselves under
surveillance.’” Kramp applies this statement
to Austen’s novels. They do not, he
asserts, advocate a specific model of
maleness; instead, they “expose a social
anxiety about masculinity and a social
response to this anxiety.” Nevertheless,
the result is that they reflect the prevailing
desire that “marriage be cleansed of
the messiness of sex and desire.”
Ultimately, Kramp argues, Austen’s novels
“teach us how heterosexual men can
solidify their involvement in the modern
national community by dismissing the
role of the lover in favor of a disciplined
social/sexual subjectivity.”

Overall, Kramp’s analysis of Austen’s
work is insightful and rather convincing.
Writing of Henry Tilney (a character who
even die-hard romantics would have
trouble regarding as an ardent lover),
Kramp demonstrates that the hero’s
“devotion to reason ... inhibits his ability
to participate in desubjectifying love relations.”
Colonel Brandon and Willoughby
are characters who learn that they must
“avoid amorous emotions” to ensure
domestic felicity; neither can “exist as an
unchecked man of sensibility.” In Pride
and Prejudice, men of trade like Bingley
and Mr. Gardiner represent the future.They may not be legendary romantic
lovers, like Darcy, but, unlike Darcy,
neither hails from a waning aristocratic
tradition. As an aristocrat, Edmund
Bertram’s inability to handle the “excitement
of modern women” (i.e. Mary
Crawford) and his marriage to Fanny
signal a rejection of amorous desire in
favor of a union that ensures the “biological
and cultural reproduction of the
English aristocracy.” Knightley is more
flexible in the sense that his rejection of
the destabilizing emotions of erotic love
leaves him free to “fuse traditional and
modern features of hegemonic masculinity.” Only Wentworth, of all
Austen’s heroes, experiences the giddy
sense of destabilization that accompanies
Deluzian love, and he, Kramp
remarks, can only serve the English
nation by leaving it for a life on the high
seas. His ability to embrace the “diversity
of his masculinity” allows him to
“live a nomadic existence with this wife,
pursuing potentially revolutionary
desires.” Thus Kramp throws a bone (or
Persuasion) to those who read Austen
for the romance.

This concession calls attention to one of
the problems with the otherwise intriguing
thesis of Disciplining Men: simply
put, Kramp makes his argument by noting
that two of Austen’s six heroes are
exceptions to the rule. Another issue is
that he takes Austen’s early material too
seriously (as a girl was Austen really
concerned with the “nation’s anxiety
about its young male citizens?”)
Nevertheless, Disciplining Men is
important because it addresses a topic
that requires addressing. Its consideration
of the various discourses concerning
masculinity that occurred during the
1790s is informative and it does a good
job illustrating moments where those
discourses surface in Austen’s novels.
Disciplining Men may annoy those who
read Austen’s novels for the romance,
but its ability to do so suggests that
Kramp is making an argument that is
well worth considering.

Nora Nachumi is an associate professor in
the Department of English of Stern College
for Women, Yeshiva University. Her most
recent article on Austen, “A Spy in the House
of Austen: Literary Critics, Lay Readers and
the Reception of Patricia Rozema’s
Mansfield Park,” is included in Performing
the “Everyday”: The Culture of Genre in the
Eighteenth Century, ed. Alden Cavenaugh
(Newark: University of Delaware Pre s s ,
2007).